Day 0 of Operator

Hello World!

I’m starting something new (again). Only this time around, with a little more grit and maturity to actually be consistent.

A bit about me: I’m an engineer turned business guy (thought there was much more money on the other side of the code). With over 8 years of experience building, shipping, and speaking about technology across various MNCs, international startups, and one failed venture of my own*, I’m currently an Operator at a DeepTech startup in the NeuroTech space. I run almost everything here in this role (except coding).

When I started building ventures, I realized there was much to learn and unlearn—especially when you’re working in a generalist role. Every day you wake up and face a new problem you’ve never dealt with in your life. You sit in front of your system and jump into the same rabbit hole of figuring things out. Again. While doing that, you learn a lot of new things (some relevant, some not), and somehow you get the job done. Then you move on to the next task. Repeat.

That’s it. Everyone does the same thing. And I’m going to document the important pieces of that cycle so a fellow operator bro* (*it’s a gender-neutral term for me, don’t come at me) has it easier. Simple as that.

I’m not creating TOM (cool shit, I like acronyms) to teach you anything—rather, to share my learnings. Because I have a theory:

For ages, we’ve been taught that the world values specialists. You become a king of one rather than a jack of none. But I disagree. Humans are good at contextual awareness. We need to become better generalists even before we become good specialists. Of course, the world pays better for experts, but in the era of AI (with 100 PhDs worth of knowledge), information access is at a level playing field. You could essentially have the same information as an expert (information practiced becomes knowledge), but you can edge out by creating better contextual correlations of that information—and thus become a Generalist.

The world will need more generalists. And no, it’s not a degree. It’s a practice. It’s a way of looking at things—be open to everything—and thou shall become a Chief of Everything. Amen!

Let us all become better generalists first.

The Operator